Healthcare is a key element of any modern society. Over the years, it has brought people the benefit of the latest technological breakthroughs that are safeguarded by well-established regulatory process. The practice of medical practitioners has also evolved into highly specialized fields and subfields. One of the most important aspects of medicine is preventive care. A significant portion of healthcare costs could be reduced if ailments are diagnosed early. Yet many of the tools to diagnose early symptoms are unavailable to the average consumer.
Vital signs of one's body, such as temperature for example, form the base map of ones health. Fluctuations in our vital signs may be predictive of undiagnosed ailments. It's important to have easy access to their vital signs as frequently as needed. Yet the average consumer has no easy method of obtaining many of their vital signs without visiting a hospital or clinic. One of the easiest-to-measure vital signs is body temperature. Consumers are able to measure body temperature at home with an inexpensive home thermometer. However the average consumer still does not have easy access to devices for measuring the other important vital signs of ones body, such as blood oxygenation or blood pressure for example. The technology is available to measure the important vital signs, but typically limited to clinics and hospitals.
Consumers do not have a way to measure all of their important vital signs at home. Consumers cannot visit their physician five or more times a day to constantly monitor their vital signs. This has put the average consumer with a medical condition into a difficult situation, where they do not know what to do with their condition when they need vital signs information while at home or traveling. The few options the average consumer has with an unknown medical condition include staying calm and doing nothing, calling their primary care providers (PCP) to get an appointment, or visiting an emergency room (ER) and waiting for hours.
Even if the consumer opted to do one of the latter options, the PCP or ER may not be able to provide personalized advice without knowing the specifics about their patients. The physician may have some idea about one's health condition based on an annual exam but the data may be outdated and useless with a current medical condition.
As a result, the average consumer may not receive the best medical care due to the lack of information. And together, with PCPs, we also manage to add more cost to the healthcare system that is already very expensive as people live longer.
The problem, simply put, is that consumer access to basic health care is rather limited. It is desirable to improve the quality and access to basic health care for average consumers.